Mine out of the billion per day

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Late Entry for Repainting the Sistine Ceiling

I’m Russ Armstrong, a photographer exploring in Philadelphia and Southeastern PA. This is the space on the site where it is customary to place an “Artist’s Statement”. Such statements represent a genre that should, quite frankly, be banned. Such statement are not as useful, say, as instructions for microwaving processed meals and, although equivalent in cultural heft, are not as entertaining as limericks. Misleading at best, most artist’s statements are testaments to the human capacity for meaningless blather. At their worst they are pretentious or just plain silly and actively interfere with the viewer’s experience of the work in question. So, gentle viewer, please browse at your leisure, confident that there will be little attempt to sully the potential purity of your experience as you contemplate the images herein.

A 2011 article* placed the number of photographs taken that year to be 360 Billion. Since the number is surely on the increase, a good working number would be that, on average, about one billion photos are taken every day. Of course, many of these are the most casual of snapshots, there’s no doubt a lot of dreck, but even if monkeys were taking this number of photos (especially if, says my dentist) there would be a lot of terrific photos among them. But, no matter, even if at this very moment a primate-equivalent is taking a photo superior to any you will find here, these are the ones I treasure sufficiently to present them as mine.